What's the cheapest AI visibility tool that covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude?

Most low cost AI visibility trackers advertise the same four logos. The logos hide the real product decision: what happens when the tool asks each engine a question.

A tool can query an engine in very different ways. It can call the vendor's API with a fixed model and web search turned off. It can call the API with search turned on. Or it can capture what the consumer app actually returns. Each method gives a different answer to the same buyer question.

That matters because your customers use the apps, not the API. If a tool measures a search-off answer, it reports what the model remembers from training. If your buyers see a search-on answer, they see what the engine retrieved today. Those can disagree about your pricing, your features and whether you're named at all.

So the cheapest plan is only cheap if it measures the answer you care about. Start with what AI visibility tools cost per month, then judge each plan by what its engine columns can actually see.

Here is how the four engines behave, as of October 2026, and what that means for a tracker.

Three details catch buyers out.

• Model cutoffs differ inside one brand name. OpenAI's docs gave the GPT-5.6 family a February 16, 2026 knowledge cutoff, while the Instant path carried August 31, 2025. A search-off ChatGPT column inherits whichever cutoff the tool picked.
• Perplexity's old endpoint changed. The Sonar Chat Completions endpoint was scheduled to retire on 27 September 2026. Code that wasn't migrated with web search enabled can return ungrounded answers without any error.
• "Google AI" is not one thing. Google states that AI Overviews and AI Mode "may use different models and techniques." A column built on the Gemini API with grounding is a proxy for the Gemini app, not for AI Overviews.

If Claude coverage is your main concern, see which tools track Claude. For whether one view can cover all of this, read can one dashboard track every AI engine.

Ask these before you pay for any budget GEO tool, including ours.

1. Which model does each column call, and when was that last updated? Apps change models often. A tool's registry can drift from what the app serves.
2. Is web search on or off for each engine? If it's off, the column measures training data, not live answers.
3. Does the Google column mean Gemini, AI Overviews or AI Mode? Ask for each one by name.
4. How many answers does the plan measure per month? Divide price by keywords times engines times runs. That gives a real cost per answer.
5. Does the tool show retrieved sources separately from citations? OpenAI's API exposes both, and the retrieved list is often larger.
6. Does it flag wrong facts, or only count mentions? A mention that gets your price wrong is worse than no mention. See how to fix AI answers that get your pricing wrong.
7. Does the score stay comparable when you add prompts? A score that falls because you bought more keywords is broken arithmetic, not a trend.

A vendor that can't answer the first three plainly is selling logos.

To make the comparison concrete, here is one published price list. We don't quote competitor prices, so use this only as a reference shape.

99Visibility's Free plan costs $0 and audits 2 platforms, with 5 keywords and 1 audit a month. Paid plans audit 5 platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. Starter is $49 a month (25 keywords, 15 audits), Growth is $99 (50 keywords, 50 audits, 3 brands) and Pro is $149 (100 keywords, 150 audits, 5 brands). The full list is on the 99Visibility pricing page.

The lesson for any vendor: the lowest tier that covers all four engines is the floor, not the answer. Check keywords and audit volume against how many buyer questions you need to watch. Our guide to GEO tool pricing breaks down what drives cost.

Every prompt-based tracker measures a sample. In Otterly's 2026 experiment, Microsoft's own AI Performance report credited one test site with 42,817 citations, while Otterly's prompt tracker logged 3,934. The time windows may not match, but the gap shows how much a prompt sample can miss. The difference between the two approaches is covered in prompt-based tracking vs engine-reported data.

Some things are outside any tool's reach. No API reveals whether your page was retrieved for a real user's query. Google exposes no position inside an AI answer. Any blended score averages answers given with and without live retrieval.

Your next move:

• Shortlist two or three tools and send each the seven questions above.
• Run the same three buyer questions through each trial and compare per-engine results, not the headline score.
• Pick the plan whose columns match how your buyers use each app.

For a fuller checklist, use how to choose an AI visibility tracking tool.